In mid July 2017, Dr. Ivan Sascha Sheehan – Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs – authored two additional op-eds on U.S. policy in the Middle East. Dr. Sheehan’s scholarship on regime change, policy-oriented writing, and media appearances have been influential in shaping Washington’s thinking on terrorism, the Iranian opposition, and the prospect of a democratic transition in Iran.

In July 2017, Dr. Ivan Sascha Sheehan–Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs – traveled to Paris as part of a distinguished research delegation examining the Iranian opposition in the lead up to the second anniversary of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. The theme of the conference – regime change in Iran – was consistent with Dr. Sheehan’s policy-oriented writing, scholarship, and media appearances, as well as analyses he has provided to policymakers in the U.S. Congress.

Dignitaries in attendance included former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich; former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge; former U.S. Attorney General Judge Michael Mukasey; and former National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, Frances Townsend, and many others. Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, former Director of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate in Saudi Arabia’s Intelligence Agency, pledged his commitment to regime change in Iran and expressed strong support for the Iranian resistance. Dr. Sheehan has written and spoken extensively on the concept of regime change in Iran in both scholarly and news outlets.

…By October of 2008, Colonel Patrick Kelleher, in a report submitted to the Joint Military Operations Department at the Naval War College, had proposed that conflict transformation be embraced wholesale by the U.S. government as the primary framework and a “paradigm” for “Security, Stability, Transition and Reconstruction Operations (SSTR)” in what was now being called the “Long War” against insurgency. Borrowing from Lederach the importance of implementing a process to achieve “sustainable results” and from other influential work by Miall, Ramsbotham, and Woodhouse, he addressed the need to achieve transformation at five levels: “context transformation,” “structural transformation,” “actor transformation,” “issue transformation,” and “personal and group transformation.” But at each level, although he used the language of conflict transformation (paying attention to “basic human needs” and “empowering civil society”), he cast its intent in clearly utilitarian and prescriptive terms, such as to “win the peace,” “to establish a new domestic order,” and “to further U.S. objectives.”